The End with CYPHERPUNK106

Final Spiral

Hello everybody. Today I am going to walk you through all of my work I did the past two weeks. This includes my Final Projects and my Daily Creates. To begin I’ll talk about my Daily Creates and I’ll finish with my Final Projects.

Daily Creates

For the last two weeks, I was tasked with completing seven Daily Creates.

I then chose to make a meme of myself. I cheated a little bit with this one because I made this meme of myself about a year ago, but it was too damn funny not to use.

Here is to my support system, my team, my family. Y’all are the reason I get up in the morning. When I started working here a year ago, I did not imagine that I would find my second family. I love each and every one of you 💕#tdc2296pic.twitter.com/dll20QbKZ5

To preface, I decided to do one big blog post rather than do multiple posts along the way. Sorry Mom.

The first project our group did was to make the Timeline JS. We decided to do a Timeline because it helped us organize the evidence in a simple way. We all jumped into the Google Sheet and edited the shit out of it. I added all the gifs and the photos. Chris and Katie worked on the links and adding the media credit. We got it done fairly quickly since there was three of us hammering it out.

After finishing the Timeline, we decided to discuss how all of our projects would fit together in a story narrative. A little backwards, but I think that the Timeline was good warm up for us. We decided to a Buzzfeed-esque conspiracy video, similar to this one. We spent a really long time honing in our conspiracy theories and making sure they were tight.

One of our ideas (really Chris’ idea) was to make the website seem like it was controlling Martha. Chris was inspired by this video game, System Shock, and a character Shodan. So, Chris recorded me saying some dialogue we wrote and he edited into A MASTERPIECE on Audacity. Honestly, Chris is such an audio master that he never fails to impress me.

We then incorporated this audio into the video we made. I made the executive decision to not film ourselves and put that in the video. I decided to make it like another Buzzfeed style (like this) where it relies mainly on photos. Katie (god bless) her did a lot of the hard work by combing through Martha’s videos and other footage and supercutting it. It really relieved some of the work for me as I mainly edited the video (I did force Chris to some of it bc I’m evil). We spent a long time editing it (from 4:30 PM-11:30 PM) so I have to say that we did this video pretty well. Because this semester I have forced myself to learn editing via Final Cut Pro, editing for me was quite easy. Yes, there were a few times when I pushed the computer towards Chris and said “plz do this my brain isn’t working.” There are a few edits on the video that I wish I could go back and fix. Namely, when it is zooming on the vials it has this weird clipping at the bottom. I thought it was a just rendering issue, but no it exported that way. So, if I could go back and do this assignment again I would adjust that more.

The difficult part out of this final project was working within the DS106 canon of work. It was really hard to put a story into this project because of how many very different pieces of evidence are out there. We decided to not conclude anything and leave our audience to decide.

This final project really taught me to be flexible with ideas. I was hesitant at first about our video idea, but I think we made it work. Furthermore, I really like our series of work as it all fits together. It is always a good, fun time when Chris, Katie, and I get together and make something. Working with them is a joy and I hope that we are able to work collaboratively on other projects in the future.

Thank you for reading this long ass post. I’ll catch y’all on the flipside.